“We would like to make a clear statement here about the negative impact of buying gold and using power-leveling services,” they begin, presumably in response to increasing activity in these pursuits. “Every day, we encounter players who have been negatively affected and targeted by companies offering these services.” The aim of the piece is to highlight how these negative effects come about, and why.

It’s an odd piece. Rather than using what you might think of as more direct language, and saying, “Stop buying gold, you cheating bastards,” they instead take the route of suggesting those who take advantage of off-world gold sellers are “victims”. It’s an interesting approach. And then they turn to our better natures.

“We regularly track the source of the gold these companies sell, and find that an alarmingly high amount comes from hacked accounts. These are the friends, relatives, and guildmates you may know who have gone through the experience of having characters, gold, and items stripped from them after visiting a website or opening a file containing a trojan virus. Our teams work to educate players and assist them in avoiding account compromise, but the fact remains that the players themselves are often these companies’ largest target as a source for gold, which the companies then turn around and sell to other players.”

There’s another interesting suggestion. Apparently people who give their account details to power levelling services (sites that will get your plucky young character up to your desired level in super-quick time) are then finding their accounts hacked months later. In fact, they claim, it’s a whole lot more serious than you might think.

“In addition to consequences such as possible account suspension or closure, in many cases the companies they paid then use their personal information to perpetrate identity theft and credit card fraud. These are long-lasting effects on players’ personal lives that can take years to recover from.”

As well as mentioning that it’s diverting Blizzard’s time away from development, which obviously players would rather their efforts were focused on, Blizzard’s approach here is very much an appeal to think beyond each individual’s immediate gain, and ask that players think as a community. Perhaps next time they’ll be a bit more direct, and start calling out the cheaters themselves.

Perhaps Blizzard can help their players out by removing the grind from their game and the reasons people would rather spend their own money instead of wasting their time pressing the same three buttons over and over killing thousands of unchallenging mobs.

This makes no sense. The game is based on leveling and therefore the grind is an integral part of the whole experience. Moreover, this information is publicly available and participation in the game is voluntary. There is no reason that Blizzard should completely redo the game, which millions of people enjoy, just so that a few bad apples are pleased. It is much more reasonable to punish them until the game is so unbearable to them that they chose to leave.

It’s a company creating this situation where imaginary gold is given imaginary worth [and levelling up so we can carry on doing what we did before but ‘on another level’].

The company then has the audacity to complain that people are not behaving in the proper way OUTSIDE of their construct.
“Oh you can’t behave like that because we wanted/expected you to behave like this!”

This leads players to get up in arms over stupid people spending their own money buying imaginary goods.

Whilst all this is going on I’m masquerading as a dwarf riding on some kind of magical bear.

I doubt that was a literal suggestion. I imagine that the meaning behind it was something like:

“When progress within a game is excessively predicated on time invested, then playing it becomes work. Which encourages people to search out some means of bypassing it to get to the fun part.
Since a capitalist society is largely based around exchanging various amounts of work for proportionate amounts of currency (and vice versa) gold-selling and buying seems an inevitable consequence of blizzard’s play model.”

Ok, consider this. I used to be in a raiding guild back when I used to play WoW, the best on our server, raiding 3 nights a week in Naxxramas. 3 nights a week is a lot of time for a man with other commitments such as a job, a wife and young child. Naxxramas was an excellent instance, really well done, but unfortunately there was a massive amount of investment required beyond actually raiding. I needed masses of cash for repairs for the endless wipes, and a load of potions were required. I loved the raiding game, but hated the grind because it was a really dull part of the game that took me away from more fun things. I wasn’t willing to give up the fun of raiding, and neither was I willing to spend extra time away from my other commitments. £15 for some gold was a small price to pay for allowing me to continue playing the parts I used to love and let me enjoy a life outside the game. Blizzard could have easily designed the end game not to require dull timesinks to go along with it.

Raskolnikov: This is a fair point, one that puts more weight behind the SOE approach of legitimised currency and character trading markets.

Surely if it’s going to happen, the devs getting a cut is both appealing to them and makes the argument that third party sellers selling imaginary gold are criminals more legitimate as it’s undermining the financial operation of the company directly.

From my perspective, the news of the Halifax group taking pre-emptive blocking measures to any payments to WoW was just another sign that MMOs aren’t really taking the initiative when it comes to the grey markets they’re creating, especially as they’re turning decidedly fraudulent, and now we’re seeing “legitimate” business flagging them as a problem area very publicly.

Perhaps it’s time to get honest and put a price tag on by-passing time sinks rather than veiling them with subscription prolonging baiting, they’ll still make their money and I think most people will still play (and pay) the way that suits them.

They could take the stance that CCP have taken for Eve and allow the trade of GTCs for gold. Its divided the Eve community, but its a relatively elegant way to allow those who want to buy ingame money without being ‘criminalised’.

BKG: It doesn’t sit right with me, a company charging a monthly sub and encouraging a secondary market which they cream money off. My wish is that they used good game design to got around these problems, either make the grind so fun that it never feels like work, or just eliminate the grind completely. Team Fortress 2 doesn’t make me grind for bullets before each match.

Blizzard got it so right in places, it’s just unfortunate that there was never really enough fun stuff to do at the level cap, so time sinks creep in. TBC made me think they’d cracked it, 60-70 was a triumph, but the game at 70 just wasn’t fun after doing all the instances.

There’s a lot of blame going to Blizzard for creating a boring gindfest, which is true and warranted, but what about the impact simply buying gold/level/items has on players and the fairness of the game. Then it becomes like any CCG where only the richest players are the elite. It’s no longer about skill but assets.

Yeah, if it was only guys and gals paying for resources to get to the fun parts of the game it would be perfectly reasonable. But I say it’s used more by people to gain an unfair advantage.

I think MMOs should have stores where players can pay for levels, or custom housing/clothing/etc, but gold,weapons, armor and other resources that give one player an edge over another should be banned. That way, the people who’re willing to pay to experience more and fun content instantly get their share, and the other players who’re just trying to gain an edge over others can be much easily spotted and banned.

When I first started playing MMORPGs, and learned about in-game/real world money trade I was very much puffed up about it! I mean players who bought plats, gil, gold whatever were (a) cheating, and (b) inflating the economy. Making it even harder for people that did it the traditional way. Also it meant that RMT were hogging the usual farming spots, camping the epic-drop monsters, etc.

Then for a time, I was rather indifferent about it. Like, yeah, you couldn’t do anything about it anyway. In a way I even thought that it enriched the virtual world with a ‘real’ aspect. Like in the real world there are crooks inside the game. Or just insanely rich people. Riches gained by birthright, being born noble, you know. So, just deal with it! Just like Bill Gates can afford a complete house filled to the brim with electronics and I could not; I could not afford that millionaire desk that would give me that nice stats boost. Anyway…

Blizzard, Verant & Co. should just sell their in-game currency on their own website to be finally done with it.

Nowadays I’ve turned around 180 degrees again. If a game doesn’t allow RMT, players should simply abide by the rules. If they don’t like the way to get that in-game currency they should either stop playing, or stay poor (in-game of course).

I’ve seen what happened if the company is cracking down hard on RMT. And it made the game so much better for people who don’t buy in-game currency (like me). Blizzard even went so far in providing ways to earn gold in a controlled manner; daily quests. You cannot do that quest over and over again and inflate the economy that way. But you have your guaranteed means to get some gold every day.

What Blizzard writes there is from my point of view very true. Gold buyers hurt themselves in the long run. They’re ruining their own experience. Unfortunately people are greedy and short-sighted.

I am consistently bemused by people who describe WoW as “grindy”. It is the least grindy MMO I have ever played, and I have played almost all of the prominent ones (and a few of those free Korean ones, before deciding that the latter were entirely and utterly grind-based as a basic principle of design. Yech.).

Maybe people who’re giving it that label are specifically thinking of endgame play, which I never reached?

Raskolnikov: No, I agree, that both a sub and a secondary market is distasteful. Either but not both is more what I would intend, but the real issue is that TF2, to use your example, isn’t capturing the imagination of an entire industry by presenting some kind of streets of gold business model.

I’m not sure a non-grind game will seem as easy to make money with, so I think we’re going to remain with this status quo until someone breaks the back of the business model rather than the game design.

Malkav11: Yeah, it’s an easier grinding experience than anything that came before it, that’s true even at endgame where it definitely sets in much more than during levelling.

The problem is that it’s a little like being freed from slavery and then pointed towards the nearest dead-end job – there’s further to go.

It’s definitely one of the least grindy MMOs on the market. But that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

But then MMO design is primitive. MMOs require so much more effort to make and have shelf lives so much longer than other kinds of game that they haven’t had as much opportunity to evolve – not enough generations. Not to mention that they had to wait until the internet became ubiquitous to really get started.

The Blizzard way to make a game seems to be to take a genre and then polish it until it gleams. It’s not their fault that with MMOs the genre they started with was mostly turd.

(and to head off potential pedants, for all instances of “MMO” above I can be assumed to be talking about the ultima online/everquest archetype, as opposed to interesting offshoots like eve or even guild wars)

I genuinely look forward to what Blizzard’s next-gen MMO will be like because WoW has obviously been a very productive learning experience for them. Even with the constraints of their original design, the content added from the burning crusade onwards is leaps and bounds better than the way the game was at release.

I don’t think they could fix any of the fundamental problems without making a new game from scratch, but their incredible success means that they’ve little choice but to keep tinkering with what they have.

Ahem.

So, gold-selling, eh?

I say that rampancy of gold-selling is a symptom of a problem as much as a problem in and of itself. Specifically a design problem; for any game, the “optimal” method of play should be the most fun. Why would you design to reward un-fun play? But like I said – MMO design is still wearing training pants. Here’s looking forward to the future.

The basic problem isn’t that gold-sellers and levelling services are creating an environment where only players who invest lots of money can succeed. Those third parties cannot provide anything that couldn’t be achieved by a player putting in the time themselves.

I think the problem is that businesses coming in and goldfarming or power-leveling means you’re competing with people who aren’t even there to have fun. A gold- seller might have no issue undercutting you at the auction house for minimal profit, hogging up mining spots and spawns, and in various other ways out-competing you through their “advantage” of not doing it for fun.

Greed becomes a whole different beast when real-life money is on the line. There’s enough griefers already who are just doing it for kicks, giving them a real-life financial reason to screw you over can do nothing but make the issue worse.

If gold selling and leveling services became a booming market I could see this creating a situation of haves and have-nots though. Goldfarmers might be able to add so much misery to the grinding process via competition and griefing that you really can’t have fun without shelling out cash and thus feeding the problem.

On the other hand, I think there is actually more of a danger of the community becoming divided between haves and have-nots based on RL financial investment, when this is done 1st-party. They can add new equipment and features that are only available to people who pay extra, which indeed is what many massively multiplayer games (usually free-to-play ones) have done. Of course, it’s their game and it makes sense for them to make money off it, whereas third-party resellers are really just parasites.

I think the silver lining on this whole issue is that if the game itself, and the grind, is actually /fun/, there’s less of a market for people to skip that fun. In other words a good game won’t have as much issues with resellers as a bad game.

Mmm. I was quite interested to see this. At one end, it’s a direct admittance that WoW has a gold selling problem that can’t be brushed under the carpet, and at the other, you have to wonder what it takes for Blizzard to put this kind of notice up on the front page of the website for the world’s most popular MMO.

Stupid is as stupid does. I’ve found that people who take short cuts in MOG’s usually are either the players who burn out fastest anyway and quit, or represent an immature presence that you’d have to deal with on some level regardless. Their impatience ultimately can not be bought away.

From Bliz’s perspective it tends to merely represent a larger unwanted segment of their support mechanism that they’re powerless to fully prevent. This announcement appears basically their way of saying “you should have thought of what could happen, see? We even posted it for you to read. Tough titty. Next caller please.”

It’s like a war on drugs; the only way ever to come out ahead of all the collateral evil is to eliminate the demand, not the supply.

I played WoW for three months. During that time, I levelled one of each Horde character class to level 25 or so, hoping one of the classes might spontaneously burst into fun.
They didn’t.
Gave up because the game was a godawful boring grind.

A year and a bit later, I did the same for all the Alliance classes. Same deal.

During that time, I played solo, in a guild and in random groups. The only part of the game that was even vaguely enjoyable was the part where I was in a guild, and then only because of the chat.

The solution, as I see it, is for more singleplayer games to integrate an IRC client into their HUDs. That way, you get all the benefit of the social, chatting experience while, at the same time, being able to play a game on your own terms, without being locked into the grind-cycle which is only there to keep players interested for long enough to kick-start the social aspect of the game, which is the real hook in MMOs, as far as I’m concerned.

Once that socialising player base is formed, as it has been in WoW, the game can actually get away with dropping the grind almost completely, as I understand they have done in the expansion (didn’t buy it, wasn’t near level 60, ’nuff said).

I’m sure there has to be a reason why the later section of the game needs to bring back the grind, but I can’t say as I can see it at this time in the morning.
I’ll have a sleep and maybe get back to you on that.

But, yeah, it’s not a question of wanting less grind, it’s a question of wanting no grind. Not for levels, not for equipment, not for money, not for ingredients, not for “rare” drops (it’s a colour map and a set of damage values in a table. “Rare”, my arse.)

I rather found EVE to be the same; a game that forced you to treat it like a job in order to keep socialising with your “workmates”. Very odd, that. I’ve worked with people who you could only just pay me to be in the same building with. Paying a monthly fee to stay in a chatroom with those same people seems a bit backward to me…

Anyway, too tired to think or form coherent arguments, I leave with the parting shot of “cognitive dissonance”.
G’night.

See, that’s what I thought WoW (mostly) got right – the quest-oriented design meant that I was having an experience not wildly dissimilar from a lot of singleplayer RPGs, except trading some of the wilder things they can do (because you have your very own space to play in) for company as you’re doing it. I can’t see anyone adding in the stuff it currently lacks as a singleplayer game without heavily instancing (the way Guild Wars does) and apparently that rubs people the wrong way so I doubt the MMO market is going to head very far that direction.

Lots of things have imaginary worth, which is in turn leveraged into real worth by people who want to rip off other people who should know better but are too greedy to pass this stuff up–or, in the case of goldfarm customers, too impatient to play a game fairly. Not like you can “win” WoW, or get prizes for “winning” WoW, so the entire motivation to play it is psychological, social, and emotional.

That’s the impression of worth and value I get from whenever people try to explain to me how economies work when things start to go downhill around the world. Or people bring up cheating in MMOs.

While I honestly couldn’t care less about WoW, MMOs, or the problems faced by the players within, I can’t help but be reminded that pretend-worth has as much value as real-worth, especially when real money is involved.

(Note that most money is “imaginary,” anyway. Ever bought something off Steam? Tried doing it with gold boullion? And why is gold so valuable, anyway? It’s not like you can eat it, or make cars out of it. Real gold or WoW gold, still imaginary value, still real money.)

I’d better stop now before I start rambling on about the guy in EVE who invested roughly $10,000 worth of time and effort to reach the top, only to lose it all to griefers.

Michael, exactly. If I’m playing battlegrounds against someone who’s spent real money to gear up their character so that they have an advantage, they’re cheaters; as much as people who would use wallhacks in an online FPS because their wife and family get in the way of their practise time. End of.

If you’re not enjoying the journey, find another journey. If the game feels like work, find a game that doesn’t. If you need help “affording” the enjoyable gameplay… face it, the design is out of wack. Leave.

[quote]Perhaps Blizzard can help their players out by removing the grind from their game and the reasons people would rather spend their own money instead of wasting their time pressing the same three buttons over and over killing thousands of unchallenging mobs.[/quote]

One of the reasons I constantly leave WoW (for 6 months at a time) is that I am so tired of end-game being one of two things: PvE grind – in order to raid, you have to do heroics. In order to do heroics, you have to do instances. Then, in order to raid, you have to have specific gear – and often talents – to be allowed. Then you have to FIND a guild (and on my server, Horde to Alliance is 1-4, so there are almost no Horde guilds that raid, and they dont need more people).

PvP grind: The so-called ‘welfare epics’ are a horrible misnomer, because you get them neither for free, not easily. It takes a long time to get. A good AV win is 500 honour – the cost of the weapon, set of armour, and one trinket is in excess of 200,000 honour. AV matches take between 20 minutes and an hour.

Then you have the grind that comes into play for both: Money and Materials.

I can totally understand buying gold. If you are a casual player who only gets an hour or two a week, the last thing you want to spend your hour on is attacking the same mob 400 times to maybe get a drop, or maybe get enough gold for something.

Keep in mind, a lot of people enjoy specific parts of the game that require excessive money to get to – endgame PvP, twink PvP, raiding, etc. If you’re a casual player, those are completely impossible – even with season 1 armour and a full vindicator set, I’m still coming up against warrioes who had 18,000 health, unbuffed. Buying gold is simply where people use money instead of time to get something.

There is no rule that says you have to have the best gear. I’ve been playing WoW for just over a year and am close to getting my first toon to 70. A friendly mix of PvP and the insane gold you can make questing in outland has left me in a position to be able to buy some nice PvP gear and my flying mount in 2 levels time. with marks, honor and gold left to be able to enjoy the game without thinking of getting bogged down to a raiding schedule.

All that and I work 40+ hours a week and have a partner who can detect when i’m on my PC in a 15 mile radius and has the most un-get-outable reasons for me to turn off and watch brain melting TV.

The game is 100% what you make it if it’s a grind to you don’t play if you see your self as casual and feel the need to buy gold don’t play.

What annoys me the most about gold buying is that it completely rapes the game economy, a 4 strength 4 stam leather belt level18 should cost 50-60s but because the market is flooded with gold buying “casual players” this price hikes up to 2-3g.. you can’t earn that kind of cash at that level easily so while making things easy for you, you fuck things up for everyone else.

It’s a massively complex argument when you get into it so i’ll shut up.

One thing i’d like to add is that surely blizz doesn’t need trial accounts anymore? Sure fire way to prevent spam and the direct adverts to players.

Gold buying suucks. I have to agree I definitely thought about it, due to just the massive timesink of the whole thing, but I am glad I never did it.

I quit WoW, because it’s not fun @ max level after awhile. However, depending on reviews, I may get the next expansion and take a Char up to Max level on a newer server. The actual “rpg” part of the game is really fun, leveling and getting new gear and equipment and changing builds and stuff. It just…well at max level, your fun grinds to a halt :P

At this point in the game (patch 2.3), it’s not necessary to buy gold or powerleveling services. Blizzard has stopped just short of mailing welfare checks to every player. You can make a fair amount of gold reliably without having to kill anything just by doing a couple daily quests in less than an hour, then rinse and repeat the next day. On top of that, you have not one, but two trade skills (four if you count fishing and cooking) and an auction house so you can conduct trade with other players. If you don’t want to go out to collect things with a gathering profession, then make an investment and go with a crafting profession.

Last patch, they reduced the amount of experience to go from level 20 to 60 (From my experience, it takes around half the time). All you have to do is quests, and people have written guides for the optimal quest circuits if you’re in a rush. The same holds for expansion content – there are enough quests and well-designed quest hubs that you don’t have to do anything besides questing to reach the level cap, and even then you will have enough quests left over to get you around 2000g because of the experience-to-gold conversion and rewards. True, a lot of quests are kill- or collect- quests, but there is enough variety in the other kind of quests (e.g., spying, aerial bombing, experiments and test flights) so that the leveling experience is more enjoyable.

Finally, gold buying isn’t the only cause of inflated prices for low-level items. With the introduction of huge amounts of gold into the game since the expansion, it is only natural that prices for everything increases. Players leveling a second or third character can afford to pay a premium for items, but it works both ways – you can also sell items for more gold.

I will note that I was very very close to ending up completely unable to continue raiding just before the daily quests were added to the game—the amount of gold I needed to spend on repairs and consumables wasn’t something I could make as a protection warrior (with no serious alts) in the time I had to play each week before or after raiding.

So, there was a serious serious problem, and while I really hate the idea of gold buying and the like, I understand why people would do it.

On the other side: I have no concerns at the moment any more about my ability to keep ahead of repairs and consumables, and things are just getting better as they increase the number of daily quests. I don’t even run all of the dailies I can any more, just enough to get by, and I’m still ending up with a net positive every week.

So—Blizzard’s done a lot of good here, I think. Both in keeping up their strong stance against gold buying (rather than caving with a “well, everybody does it…” mentality) and decreasing the value of being a gold seller. (There’s a heck of a lot less demand for gold now—the daily quests provide a mechanism for anybody to make some cash fast, without allowing gold farmers to make it in the quantities required to be profitable.)

Perhaps the only down-side here is that because it’s impossible to make sufficient quantities of gold cost effectively by grinding any more, there might be more reason to hack accounts for money to make a quick buck. It certainly did happen before, but I suspect that it’s become an increasingly large portion of the gold supply as the more traditional sources start to dry up.

I’m not sure there’s much way around that.

As for the points about gold sellers providing ID info to other people to use for identity theft, etc… I can pretty much guarantee this. Information gets traded around out in the wastelands of computer crime like you wouldn’t believe, and chances are pretty good that you’ll never realize any sort of connection because you’re just an entry on a list being passed around somewhere for months or years until somebody picks you out at random.

In short: kudos to Blizzard for keeping up their hard-line stance on this issue, and for trying to deal with it through both enforcement and through mechanical means. And, a warning to people who give out their account info: don’t do it unless you’d trust that person with your credit cards.

I’ve read most of these comments but not all of them. I would like to say this though. I’ve been apart of the Eve Online MMO since something like 3 months after it was released (something like 4 or 5 years I think).

When I first started I loved grinding those asteroids I worked for four WEEKS to get my first cruiser. I then lost it two weeks later in a senseless early gatecamp. I also worked for 2 months to earn enough money to get my first battleship!

I used to play for 8-12 hours a day, and while I fondly remember those times… I was 21 or 22 years old, with no real significant other and a poorly paying job.

I’m older now, I have a wife and a house and a great paying job. All of those scream for attention, to me my IRL time is way more important

While I Love playing Eve and love mining, I just dont have the time any more to mine the ore/find someone to refine it and find the best places to sell it, and STILL have time to PVP.

I have become a casual player who loves to PVP. So I spend 20-40 bucks every 3 to 6 months on 500 million isk to be able to fly around and lose my ship to people much more skilled than me. I love every moment of it.

I don’t condone buying isk but when it would take hours to make enough money to be able to fly a ship you can lose in 5 minutes of combat, it’s just a matter of priorities. What do you care about more? Real life, or your gaming universe.

I personally love my real life, I love my wife, my good paying job and my house. I just want to occasionally dabble in the entertainment of the game.